ABSTRACT
One potentially very powerful exploratory resource that can be employed in social psychological science is the ability of human agents to provide accounts of their psychological states. The analysis of self-knowledge advanced in this chapter suggests that any form of 'inner focus' is misdirected and distorting, and it may be the greatest impediment to self-knowledge. Self-knowledge does not involve any form of inference or perception or labelling. Social constructionists claim that there is no such entity as 'the self that is the object of self-knowledge, or which can be the object of scientific knowledge. One of the ironies of the early disagreement between philosophers and psychologists is that both their accounts were based upon the traditional empiricist assumption about the homogeneity of sensation and cognition. The classical empiricist account of cognition, our thoughts or 'ideas' were held to differ from sensations in degree but not in kind: they were held to be 'copies' or 'faint images' of 'sense-impressions'.
